iPad Mini Due In March 2013

So soon. For those of you holding off to purchase the first generation of the iPad mini, you may not have to wait too long. Rumor on the street says that a second generation of the iPad mini with Retina display is due in March of this year. That’s one quick turnaround.

A friend of mine who is a bit older, said that he couldn’t really tell a difference between an iPad mini without a Retina display, and the original iPad equipped with a Retina display. I think he is saying the screen on the iPad mini is not as bad. I think the screen size of the iPad mini and the screen resolution somewhat makes it quite acceptable.

But, the upcoming Retina display on the iPad mini will really make the screen much clearer. Most people would be able to tell a difference. Some apps will really take advantage of the Retina display and make the iPad mini shine. So, I can’t wait for this second generation of the iPad mini to get here. And March is just around the corner.

How To Make TinyMCE fonts bigger

The following instructions will show you how to make the fonts on your TinyMCE editor a little bigger than the default 10px. If your eyes are not as good mine, then you may need to increase the fonts to something a little bit more legible. Font sizes bigger than 12px would do.

If you are not familiar with TinyMCE, it’s a popular web-based text editor used by many web applications, CMS and blogging software. WordPress uses TinyMCE editor as well, which is the blogging software for this blog. Now, if you need to increase the size of the text in the textarea, then you will need to edit the several themes that came with TinyMCE.

I ended up editing several themes anyway because I didn’t clear the cache at first, and I kept trying different themes without seeing any changes. You will need to clear the cache in your browser to really see the desired results.

There are a total of 4 different themes in the TinyMCE folder. They are located at: tiny_mce/themes/advanced or tiny_mce/themes/simple folders. Change the font size for the textarea of the theme you are using. I found the CSS at the top of each file.

Clear your cache and reboot. You should see a much bigger font size of 12px.

Converting To AT&T Uverse

A few weeks back, AT&T notified me that they are converting the entire neighborhood from DSL to Uverse. To make the switch, they are sending out a free modem. They told me the download speed is going to be the same, which is 6MB, which is not fast by any means, but it serves my purpose. I could always a higher speed, but it will cost more. The upload speed is 1MB, which is about 3 times faster than the 300kb than I have now. As part of the promotional, they will only charge me $20 per month for 1 year. After that, it goes back to the usual $43 per month. It think it’s a great deal.

Twenty Twelve Theme

I recently changed themes from a custom made one, that I’ve used for a long time, to a theme called Twenty Twelve, the current WordPress default theme. I made one slight change though which alters the entire look of the theme. I changed font from the default ‘Open Sans’ to ‘Lato’ which is available from Google. To facilitate the change, I’m using my Webfonts plugin and this CSS code: #page {font-family:’Lato’, sans-serif;}.

How To Setup Client Bridge

I have an old Linksys WRT54GL router flashed with an open-source firmware DD-WRT. One of the nice things you can do with DD-WRT is configure it as a client bridge. You can then use the client bridge to connect a computer with no wireless network interface to the network. This article was written to help me remember in the future how to setup a client bridge on a Linksys WRT54GL flashed with DD-WRT. The configuration details pertains more to me and may not necessarily work out for your setup. If you want a more complete instruction, check out the client bridge documentation available from DD-WRT’s website.

Reset the router. Login. Set username and password.
Go to Wireless > Wireless Security. Set security mode and key to match your AP.
Go to Wireless > Basic. Set wireless mode to Client Bridge.
The wireless mode and SSID should be the same as your AP.
Go to Setup > Basic setup and manually set IP address.
Set IP address to 10.10.10.12. Leave local DNS blank. Main router is 10.10.10.11.
Go to Security > Firewall and disable SPI firewall and only multicast checked.
Go to Setup > Advanced Routing. Change mode from gateway to router.

Hey Google, Happy Now?

Dear Google,

Is this website to your liking now? Just to let you know, if you haven’t already noticed, I’ve decided to turn off Google Adwords on my website. That’s right. I’m breaking up with you. Nice knowing you. Have a nice life. I hope you feel better.

Do you want to know why I dumped you? I’m no longer participating in your dumb Google Adwords program because you have way too many rules and regulations. You can’t do this, you can’t do that. First, you demand “nofollow” on all links. But that really didn’t matter, because you manually altered and lowered my page ranking anyways. I could care less about page ranking. You can rank mine to negative 5 million if you want. I don’t give a hoot.

Finally, today was the final straw. Now, you want to dictate how and where I can place my ads. So that everyone here reading this knows, here’s the warning and alert message from Google.

LAYOUT ENCOURAGES ACCIDENTAL CLICKS: Publishers are not permitted to encourage users to click on Google ads in any way. This includes any implementation that may encourage accidental clicks, such as placing ads near flash games or navigation bars, or placing ads and site links extremely close together.

Please. I am done with you. Now that your dumb ads are gone from my website, I can finally have my freedom back. I can do anything to my site. I can use any layout, and any design that I want, without you telling me what to do. I don’t have to adhere to your stupid rules and regulations just to make you happy.

By the way, you can shove that worthless couple of dollars a month to where the sun don’t shine. You guys are cheap. Other advertisers pay more. I’m sorry I already found a replacement. And please, don’t bother explaining and rationalizing what you did, because I’m done listening to you. Comments are off.

Netflix Is Down

Tonight is one of those nights lots of families are staying home. Watching Netflix might be one of those favorite past times in between all the festive activities. The timing couldn’t have been worse for Netflix to go down tonight. Blame it all on AWS, Amazon Web Services, for the spotty web service, stemming from the its Northern Virginia data center. This is the third time AWS has gone down this year.

iPad Magic

Here’s some iPad magic by Simon Pierro, courtesy of Mashable. Here is Simon’s Youtube channel if you’re interested in seeing all his magic tricks. He is a decent magician, and he has put on a ton of work with the iPad. It’s refreshing to see a magician use and embrace technology, and incorporate it with something as old as magic.

Skewing Prices Based On Location

Gizmodo just ran a piece how some websites would skew their online prices depending on where you live. Of course, this is entirely possible based on info they already have about you, when you log in with your account info. Wireless providers have been doing this for years, presenting different types of phones and services based on the zip code provided. Shipping rates have also varied based on location. That’s understandable, but online prices being different based on where you live is bit discriminatory. I wonder if you can fool the system by logging into different web proxy servers with IP addresses that are registered in different parts of the country. Anyhow, interesting stuff.

Join Files Using Linux Sox

I was recording audio on Audacity the other day when Windows crashed unexpectedly. I never had a chance to save the recording. When Windows rebooted, the audio recording were all there, but they were all broken up in smaller files. As it turned out, they were over 100 .au files under the unsaved Audacity folder. The question is how do you piece the files together.

There’s a Linux sound utility called “SoX” that runs across multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, MacOS X, that converts various formats of computer audio files into other formats. SoX can play and record audio files as well. To recover the unsaved Audacity recording, I went to the Audacity folder and executed the following statement from the command line.

sox *.au combined.au

Essentially, the sox command you see above concatenates multiple files into one big file called combined.au. After that, I created a new Audacity project and imported the combined big file into the new project. I then saved the new project. Once saved, I can then export the project to a MP3 format.

If you ever need to recover from a crashed Audacity project, you can use the sox command to recover a project.

Ulyssesonline

the online surfer